Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 278 posts

Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#61

Post by stefan_ »

photochemsyn wrote: post #50

One major theme in the ongoing US-Russia conflict over the past decade-plus (dating back to at least 2008) is a fight over who gets to sell oil and gas to Europe. With the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines, and with countries like Qatar refusing to alter long-term energy contracts to increase supplies to Europe, and with Iran still under the Trump-era sanctions (which Biden continued), that mostly leaves the US…

LNG was never going to be competitive with pipeline gas, no one was in some "fight" over US or Russia selling to EU. But there sure is a long, long history of Russia using its gas supplies to blackmail and manipulate ex-USSR and other states, including using it's old puppet governments in Ukraine to literally disarm it.

Their coercion extended to bombing pipelines, too, of course:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Russia%E2%80%93Georgia_en...

Finally, the price of LNG is so high as to be thoroughly uninteresting for bulk uses like heating. That means it is rapidly being displaced by other methods like heat pumps. The future isn't "LNG from the US", it's "no gas" and current events have very much turbocharged that transformation.

Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#63

Post by blibble »

rowanajmarshall wrote: post #59
pydry wrote: post #31

Mild autumn weather [ and not enough storage capacity to take advantage ] has sent European gas prices plummeting. 90% full in the UK means about a week's worth of gas. In Germany it's about 2.5 months.

Although the UK has an appreciable percentage of Europe's LNG re-gasification capacity, while Germany has none, and imports LNG via Belgium and the Netherlands instead. The UK has storage, it's just sitting in ships off the coast.

and a large chunk of UK supply is still domestically produced from the North Sea

Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#64

Post by radu_floricica »

tsimionescu wrote: post #45
radu_floricica wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, since you started, let me challenge that head on: so far climate change is good . Cold-related deaths decreased something like 1-2 orders of magnitude more than a paltry increase in heat deaths. You're trying to make me fill guilty for enjoying nice weather? Really? Well, how do you feel about advocating for literally more dead people in the foreseeable future? And before you try bringing doomsday scenarios into…

Wow, that's almost delusional. It's like you don't understand what drought is, or haven't looked at any of the predictions about heat waves, the mass extinction events, the extreme weather, the fires... This is a new level of madness from the fight against the fight against climate change. Don't look up, my friend.

Yeah, delusional.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...

> 8·52% were cold-related and 0·91% were heat-related [...] Eastern Europe had the highest heat-related excess death rate and Sub-Saharan Africa had the highest cold-related excess death rate.

Or look here and show me the disasters we're likely to have: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/ Cause a see a bunch of "not good", but I somehow fail to see any "billions will die". Or is that not an official enough source for you?

But yeah, it's easy to say "delusional" and drop a bunch of scary words without context. Drought is the thing farmers deal with every few years for literally over 10 millennia. Fires? Extreme weather? yeah, we have that, daily. Without putting some numbers on that it's just fearmongering. But putting numbers makes your position vulnerable - because on one hand global warming does have some good effects, and also wealth and tech more than compensate the ill-effects. For example you may find numbers on extreme weather increasing - but if you look at people affected by it, it's steadily going down. Not exactly the picture you're trying to paint with the scary words.

Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#65

Post by badpun »

paganel wrote: post #39

Looking at this chart [1] they're still 6 or 7 times more expensive compared to two years ago and further back, i.e. ~15 EUR/Mwh compared to the present ~100 EUR/Mwh. No energy-intensive industry can sustain a 6 or 7 times price increase of its core input. [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eu-natural-gas

These are the month-ahead contracts prices. The day ahead are at around 10% of that (the gas is almost free, compared to what it costed just couple months ago). It's probably just temporary curiosity though.

Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#66

Post by VBprogrammer »

cinntaile wrote: post #49
VBprogrammer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it feels like cherry picking when people say something like "climate change makes severe weather events more likely" in connection with a drought or unusually hot spell but ridicule anyone who tries to use a particularly cold winter as evidence that climate change is not happening. We should avoid the association between climate and short term weather phenomenon altogether. And yes, the COVID lockdowns showed th…

> Yes, it feels like cherry picking when people say something like "climate change makes severe weather events more likely" in connection with a drought or unusually hot spell but ridicule anyone who tries to use a particularly cold winter as evidence that climate change is not happening. Climate change results in more extreme weather, both warm and cold. So a particularly cold winter can be a result of climate chang…

Sure but that's not the point. The point is associating any single weather event with climate change is wrong whether it helps your case or not.

You can say something like over the last decade droughts are 32% more frequently than in the previous decade but just tacking it arbitrarily on to any reporting about a particular weather event is misleading.

Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#67

Post by badpun »

politelemon wrote: post #5

> enjoyed the warmest October I abhor this kind of language that news sites use. It takes away from the seriousness of the underlying cause (and its effects), and associates hot/warm weather with "good". Public apathy towards climate change starts here.

We can't be in denial about climate changes having positive effects as well - e.g. cold countries will spend less on winter heating. That's normal, basically every phenomenon has positive and negative consequences, and what ultimately counts is the net impact.

Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#68

Post by 7952 »

rowanajmarshall wrote: post #59
pydry wrote: post #31

Mild autumn weather [ and not enough storage capacity to take advantage ] has sent European gas prices plummeting. 90% full in the UK means about a week's worth of gas. In Germany it's about 2.5 months.

Although the UK has an appreciable percentage of Europe's LNG re-gasification capacity, while Germany has none, and imports LNG via Belgium and the Netherlands instead. The UK has storage, it's just sitting in ships off the coast.

And the UK has relatively more secure sources in Norway and the North Sea.

Re: Mild autumn weather has sent European gas prices plummeting

#70

Post by photochemsyn »

dotancohen wrote: post #53
photochemsyn wrote: post #50

One major theme in the ongoing US-Russia conflict over the past decade-plus (dating back to at least 2008) is a fight over who gets to sell oil and gas to Europe. With the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines, and with countries like Qatar refusing to alter long-term energy contracts to increase supplies to Europe, and with Iran still under the Trump-era sanctions (which Biden continued), that mostly leaves the US…

> With the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines ... that mostly leaves > the USA as the primary supplier. Does that suggest motive for the destruction? Who else has both motive and means?

The means is an interesting question. Having done a little scuba diving, the depth of the pipelines (70-90 meters) put it out of range of any diver without a sophisticated mix of gases (Trimix diving). A remotely operated vehicle would also work. The pipelines were made of thick steel wrapped with concrete, so some kind of high-tech explosive was necessary, perhaps shaped charges (used in the oil industry for blowing holes in pipe casing to increase oil flow, for example).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_pipeline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimix_(breathing_gas)

See the EPA for details. I guess it's okay to link to this, it's an official US government site.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/casingperf...

Perhaps locating both of the pipelines deep under the water would be difficult? Point being, the ability to do this might not be as exclusive to nation-states as it has been portrayed (note the ease with which the videographer found the pipelines with an ROV, although the big bubbles probably helped). So, who knows?

As far as who benefited, well, Russia certainly seems to want to continue selling gas to Europe, and is pushing for repair of the pipelines. The USA wants to replace Russian gas with American LNG. Coming up with a reason for Russia to do it would require some mental gymnastics, I think.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/12/putin-offers-to-bo...

Post reply on HN